Odds of WBB winning the National Championship....
- Thread starter King Ward
- Start date
I'll get in on the odds-making. First, I do think Dawn's team is the favorite to win, but I don't think any team has a 50% chance at this point. I'd say there's about a 15-20% chance of the girls going undefeated during the NCAA tournament. I don't think I'd give any other team more than 10%.
1. Cooke needs to get back to her normal game.
2. no injuries.
3. Rivers continues to improve.
4. Henny gets even better with her 3-point shooting.
5. Amihere steps it up
6. everyone else simply does what they do
7. we start hitting 70%+ of our FT's.
8. continue to play elite defense.
these are all reasonable expectations. we do that and IMO the odds become 85/15 in our favor.
2. no injuries.
3. Rivers continues to improve.
4. Henny gets even better with her 3-point shooting.
5. Amihere steps it up
6. everyone else simply does what they do
7. we start hitting 70%+ of our FT's.
8. continue to play elite defense.
these are all reasonable expectations. we do that and IMO the odds become 85/15 in our favor.
I think we have the best athletes, not the best basketball players or the best team. But on a given day they can definitely beat anybody.
Absolutely. We've run up on a year where we might have the only really standout team around. Look at all the perennial powers who are NOT great this year.
I would say 95 -5 for our girls. We have enough that when one player is in a slump, we have others who have limited time that pick it up and emerge. I have liked the offense coming out of the break. but I think people want us to beat every team by 40 which is not going to be Dawn's style. With the talent we have, Dawn has chosen to incorporate the bench in heavier minutes in the first half when we get off to big leads. She allows them to work through their funks and poor decisions on the court rather than bailing them out with timeouts and uses this to teach them to be physically and mentally tough. This, to me is why our upperclassmen are so mentally strong to withstand runs from good teams and we never hear them complaining about an usually physical or mentally draining game. This, while not pleasing to the eye at times or the scoreboard margin watcher will pay real dividends later in the tourney. We are growing our bench to about 12 players that can play at anytime and consistently deliver high quality basketball . This is why I am confident. The key to the postseason is to be able to slow down any team that has a big time offense or offensive player. On defense, we have answers all over the place and that is growing with the maturity of Rivers and Hall. When we beat Uconn earlier this year, and Maryland, Stanford etc.. those teams struggled in the second half because of the cumulative effect of our defense. I would say our bench now is more productive so that when we see these teams again, we can take that tempo up a notch. Of course anyone can be beat on a given day, but no one in the country has our margin of error and most teams that would be near our talent base have lost players or are playing with a much shorter bench. Because of the work the girls have already done, our seeding should produce a schedule where we should only play a one or two games against decent competition to reach the final four, and once there, we will see how it all plays out.
I hope it works out just as you say. As I said earlier, this is one year where there is no big, bad juggernaut out there that we have to hope not to play. We have the best overall collection of talent.
